Great Noir Fiction

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  Hawes came this way often. This town was in the exact center of the five-hundred-mile radius he traveled as an executioner. So he came to this town three or four times a month, not just when he had somebody to hang here.

  And he always came to Maude’s.

  Maude was the plump giggling madame who ran the town’s only whorehouse. She had an agreement with the sheriff that if she kept her house a quarter mile away from town, and if she ran her place clean, meaning no drugs or no black whores or no black customers, then the sheriff would leave her alone, meaning of course he would keep at bay the zealous German Lutherans who made up the town. Maude gave the lawman money but not much, and every once in a while he’d sneak up on the back porch where one of the runaway farm girls she employed would offer the sheriff her wet glistening lips.

  He could hear the player piano now, Hawes could, lonely on the rainy prairie night. He wished he hadn’t told that pipsqueak journalist about the blonde woman because now Hawes was thinking about her again, and what really happened that morning.

  The house was a white two-story job. In front, two horses were tied to a post, and down a ways a buggy dun stood ground-tied.

  Hawes went up to the door and knocked.

  Maude herself opened it. “Well, for shit’s sake, girls, look who’s here.”

  Downstairs there was a parlor, which was where the player piano was, and the girls sat on a couch and you chose them the way you did cattle at a livestock auction.

  Hawes always asked for the same one. He looked at the five girls sitting there watching him. They were about what you’d expect for a midwestern prairie whorehouse—young girls quickly losing their bloom. They drank too much and laughed too loud and weren’t always good about keeping themselves clean.

  That was why he always asked for Lucy.

  “She’s here, Maude?”

  Maude winked at him. “Just taking a bath.”

  “I see.”

  “Won’t be long.” She knew his tastes, knew he didn’t want to stay downstairs with the girls and the piano and the two cowboys who were giggling about which girls they’d pick. “You know the end room on the hall?”

  “Right.”

  “Why don’t you go up there and wait for her?”

  “Good idea.”

  “You’ll find some bourbon in the drawer.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  She winked at him again. “Hear you’re hanging the Parsons boy in the morning.”

  “I never know their names.”

  “Well, take it from me, sweetie, when he used to come here he didn’t tip worth a shit. Anything he gets from you, he’s got coming.” And then she whooped a laugh and slapped him on the back and said, “You just go right up those stairs, sweetie.”

  He nodded, mumbling a thank-you, and turned away from her before he had to look directly at the small brown stubs of her teeth. The sight and stench of her mouth had always sickened him.

  He wondered how many men had lain in this dark room. He wondered how many men had felt this loneliness. He wondered how many men had heard a woman’s footsteps coming down the hall, and felt fear and shame.

  Lucy opened the door. She was silhouetted in the flickering hall light. “You want me to get a lantern?”

  “That’s all right.”

  She laughed. “Never known a man who likes the dark the way you do.”

  She came in, closed the door behind her. She smelled of soapy bath water and jasmine. She wasn’t pretty, but she kept herself clean and he appreciated it.

  “Should’ve just left my clothes off, I guess,” she said. “After my bath, I mean.”

  He could tell she was nervous. The darkness always made her like this.

  Wind and rain spattered against the window. The fingers of a dead branch scraped the glass, a curious kind of music.

  She came over to the bed and stood above him. She took his hand and pressed it lightly against her sex. She was dry and warm.

  “You going to move over?”

  He rolled over so there was room for her. He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling.

  As usual when they lay there, Lucy smoked a cigarette. She always hand-rolled two or three before coming to see Hawes because many times the night consisted of talk and nothing more.

  “You want a drag?” she said.

  “No thanks.”

  “How you doing?”

  “All right, I guess.”

  “Hear you’re going to hang a man tomorrow.”

  “Yes.”

  Next to him, she shuddered, her whole naked skinny body. “Forgive me for saying so, Hawes, but I just don’t know how you can do it.”

  “You’ve said that before.”

  She laughed again. “Yes, I guess I have.”

  They lay there silent for a time, just the wind and the rain pattering the roof, just the occasional glow of her cigarette as she dragged on it, just his own breathing.

  And the darkness; oh, yes, the darkness.

  “You ever read anything by Louisa May Alcott?” Lucy asked. “No.”

  “I’m reading this book by her now. It’s real good, Hawes, you should read it sometime.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  That was another thing he liked about Lucy. Where most of the girls were ignorant, Lucy had gone through fourth grade before running away, and had learned to read. Hawes could carry on a good conversation with her and he appreciated that. Of course, she was older, too, twenty-five or so, and that also made a difference.

  They fell into silence again.

  After a while he rolled over and kissed her.

  She said, “Just a minute.”

  She stubbed her cigarette out and then rolled back to him and then they got down to it seriously.

  The fear was there as always—could he actually do it and do it right without humiliating himself as usual?—but tonight he had no trouble.

  He was good and hard and he got in her with no trouble and she responded as if she really gave a damn about him, and then he came and he collapsed next to her, his breath heaving in the darkness, and him feeling pretty damn good about himself as a man again.

  She didn’t say anything for a long time there in the wind and rain and darkness, her naked and moist from where his body had been pressing on her, and her smoking a cigarette again, and then she said, “That’s why she left you, isn’t it?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your wife. Why she left you.”

  “I’m not following you.” But he was in fact following her and he sensed that she was going to say something he didn’t want to hear.

  “That time you got drunk up here in the room,” she said. “Yeah? What about it?”

  “You told me about your wife leaving you.”

  “So?”

  “But you wouldn’t tell my why she left you. You just kept saying ‘She had a good reason, I guess.’ Well, I finally figured out what that reason is.”

  He was silent for a time again, and so was she.

  Obviously she could sense that she’d spooked him and now she was feeling bad about it. “I shouldn’t have said anything, Hawes. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  He was feeling the loneliness again. He wanted to cry, but he wasn’t a man given to tears.

  “Me and my big fucking mouth,” Lucy said, lighting another cigarette.

  In the flash of flame, he could see her face. Soft, freckled, eyes the blue of a spring sky.

  They lay in silence a long time.

  She said, “You mad at me, Hawes?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry I said anything.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, it doesn’t bother me. The way you are.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s kind of funny, even.”

  “It isn’t funny to me.”

  And it hadn’t been funny to his wife Sara, either. Once she’d figured out the pattern, she’d left him immediately.

  “H
ow’d you figure it out?” he asked.

  “I just started keeping track.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I won’t tell anybody. I mean, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

  “I appreciate it. You keeping it to yourself, I mean.”

  “You can’t help the way you are.”

  “No; no, I guess I can’t.”

  He thought of how angry and disgusted his wife Sara had been when she’d finally figured it, how he was impotent all the time except for the night before a hanging. Only then could he become fully a man.

  The snap of the trapdoor; the snap of the neck. And then extinction. Blackness; utter, eternal blackness. And Hawes controlling it all.

  In the wind and darkness, she said, “You ever think about how it’ll be for you personally?”

  “How what’ll be?”

  “Death.”

  “Yeah; I guess so.”

  “You think there’re angels?”

  “No.”

  “You think there’s a heaven?”

  “No.”

  “You think there’s a God?”

  “No.”

  She took a long drag on her cigarette. “Neither do I, Hawes. But I sure wish I did.”

  From down the hall, Hawes could hear a man laughing, and then a woman joining in. The player piano downstairs was going again.

  “Would you just hold me?” Hawes said.

  “What?”

  “Just hold me in your arms.”

  “Sure.”

  “Real tight.”

  “All right.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette and then rolled back to him.

  She took him in her arms with surprising tenderness, and held him to her, her soft breasts warm against his chest, and then she said, “Sometimes I think you’re my little boy, Hawes. You know that?”

  But Hawes wasn’t paying attention; he was listening to the chill rain on the dark wind, and the lonely frantic laughter down the hall.

  The wind grew louder then, and Lucy fell silent, just holding him tighter; tighter.

  Introduction to

  The Red Scarf

  Bill Pronzini

  Gil Brewer was one of the major voices to evolve from the Gold Medal paperbacks of the fifties. Here, Bill Pronzini, in a piece originally published in Mystery Scene, charts Brewer’s sad life.

  I don’t like the Murder, She Wrote TV show.

  I don’t like it because it gives a false and distorted picture of what it’s like to be a mystery writer. Dear Jessica effortlessly produces a couple of novels which become instant bestsellers. Critics and readers adore them, every one. Film and play producers flock to her door, offering huge amounts of money. She attends fancy New York parties and everyone knows her name, everyone praises her work. Small towns, ditto. Foreign countries, ditto. Her agent is a prince; so are her U.S. and foreign publishers. She has no career setbacks, no private demons. She writes when she feels like it, which isn’t very often, and never has to worry about money. Her life is full of adventure, romance, excitement, joy. It is the kind of life even royalty envies.

  Well, bullshit.

  You want to know what the life of a working mystery writer is really like? Gil Brewer could tell you. He could tell you about the taste of success and fame that never quite becomes a meal; the shattered dreams and lost hopes, the loneliness, the rejections and failures and empty promises, the lies and deceit, the bitterness, the self-doubts, the dry spells and dried-up markets, the constant and painful grubbing for enough money to make ends meet. He could tell you about all of that, and much more. He would, too, if he were still alive. But he isn’t.

  Gil Brewer drank himself to death on the second day of January, in the Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and eight-three, at the age of sixty.

  . . . Last year [1981] I nearly croaked; not through drinking, but because I had an infected lung, emphysema, heart failure and pneumonia—all at the same time. It was a rough go at the hospital. Then nearly a year of sobriety and I figured I was ready for work, when things went to pot again.

  . . . I’m ashamed of all the evil damned things I’ve done when drinking. [But] I’m straight now, and must remain so, because one more drink and Gil Brewer goes down the slot.

  Sure, it’s a cliché. Look at all the writers who have destroyed themselves with alcohol. Poe, Stephen Crane, O. Henry, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Parker. Fitzgerald. Faulkner. O’Hara. And Hammett. And Chandler. And hundreds more. So does it really matter that a minor mystery writer named Gil Brewer also drank himself to death?

  Damned right it does.

  It matters because he was a gentle, sensitive, vulnerable man who felt too deeply and cared too much.

  It matters because he produced some of the most compelling noir softcover originals of the 1950s.

  It matters because he understood and loved fine writing and hungered to create it himself, to just once write something of depth and beauty and meaning.

  It matters because of the writer he might have been with a little luck, encouragement, and the proper guidance, for in him there was a small untapped core of greatness.

  It matters because if it doesn’t, then nothing does.

  . . . For all my seemingly sometimes rattlebrained manner, I am actually deathly sincere and serious about my writing. . . . Am only happy—my only real happiness—at the machine.

  Gil Brewer was born in relative poverty in Canandaigua, New York, in November of 1922. He dropped out of school to work, but retained a thirst for knowledge and a love of books; he was an omnivorous reader. At the outbreak of World War II he joined the Army and served in France and Belgium, seeing action and receiving wounds that entitled him to a VA disability pension. After the war, he worked at a variety of jobs—warehouseman, cannery worker, bookseller, gas station attendant—while pursuing a lifelong desire to write fiction.

  His early efforts were not crime stories but mainstream and “literary” exercises. He sent some of these to Joseph T. Shaw, the former editor of Black Mask, who had become a successful literary agent in the 40s. Shaw liked what he saw and encouraged Brewer to keep writing, though with a more commercial slant to his work.

  I began as a “serious ” writer, and came close, but married and had to have money so switched to pulp. I was with Joe Shaw at that time. I sold shorts to Detective Tales, etc. Shaw had my entire career planned. I tried writing a suspense book to see if I could do it, and wrote one single-spaced in five days. Then I wrote Satin Is a Woman and Gold Medal bought it and asked for more—Dick Carroll and Bill Lengel—and Joe said to me, “You’ve already got another one [finished]. The five-day book, So Rich, So Dead. So GM published that. Then I wrote 13 French Street and was off to the races.

  Fawcett was the first and best of the softcover publishers to specialize in original, male-oriented mysteries, Westerns, historicals, and “modern” novels. Their Gold Medal line was in its infancy (the first GM titles appeared in late 1949) when they bought Brewer’s first two novels in 1950; but GM’s success was already guaranteed. They had assembled, and would continue to assemble, some of the best popular and category writers of the period by paying royalty advances based on the number of copies printed, rather than on the number of copies sold; thus writers received handsome sums up front, up to three and four times as much as hardcover publishers were paying. Into the GM stable came such established names as W. R. Burnett, Cornell Wool- rich, Sax Rohmer, MacKinlay Kantor, Wade Miller, and Octavus Roy Cohen; such top pulpeteers as John D. MacDonald, Bruno Fischer, Day Keene, David Goodis, Harry Whittington, Edward S. Aarons, and Dan Cushman; and such talented newcomers as Charles Williams, Richard S. Prather, Stephen Marlowe, and Gil Brewer.

  What the Fawcett brain trust and the Fawcett writers succeeded in doing was adapting the tried-and-true pulp fiction formula of the 30s and 40s to post-war American society, with all its changes in lifestyle and morality and its newfound sophistication. Instead of a bulky magazine full of short stories, they pr
ovided brand-new, easy-to-read novels in the handy pocket format. Instead of gaudy, juvenile shoot-’em-up cover art, they utilized the “peekaboo sex” approach to catching the reader’s eye: women depicted either nude (as seen from the side or rear) or with a great deal of cleavage and/or leg showing, in a variety of provocative poses. Instead of printing a hundred thousand copies of a small number of titles, they printed hundreds of thousands of copies of many titles so as to reach every possible outlet and buyer.

  They were selling pulp fiction, yes, but it was a different, upscale kind of pulp. On the one hand, the novels published by Fawcett—and by the best of their competitors, Dell, Avon, and Popular Library—were short (generally around 50,000 words), rapidly paced, with emphasis on action. On the other hand, they were well-written, well-plotted, peopled by sharply delineated and believable characters, spiced with sex, often imbued with psychological insight, and set in vividly drawn, often exotic locales . . . the stuff of any good commercial novel, then or now. Thanks to writers such as Gil Brewer, the best of the Gold Medal novels are the apotheosis of pulp fiction—rough-hewn, minor works of art, perfectly suited to and representative of their era. What has been labeled as pulp since the early 60s is not the genuine article; it is an offshoot of pulp, or a mutation of pulp, reflective of the “new world” that has been created by the technological and other sweeping changes of the past twenty-five years. The last piece of true-pulp-as-art was published circa 1965.

  Readers responded to the Gold Medal formula with enthusiasm and in huge numbers. It was common in GM’s first few years for individual titles to sell up to 500,000 copies, and not all that unusual for one to surpass the 1,000,000 mark. Brewer’s 13 French Street, published in 1951, was one of those early million- copy bestsellers, going into eight separate printings and many overprintings.

  13 French Street is not his best novel. A deadly-triangle tale of two old friends, one of whom has fallen mysteriously ill, and the sick one’s evil wife, it has a thin and rather predictable plot; and too much of the narrative takes place in the house at the title address. Nevertheless, it has all of the qualities that give Brewer’s work its individuality and power. The prose is lean, Hem- ingwayesque (Hemingway’s influence is apparent throughout the Brewer canon), and yet rich with raw emotion genuinely portrayed and felt. It makes effective use of one of his obsessive themes, that of a weak, foolish, and/or disillusioned man corrupted and either destroyed or nearly destroyed by a wicked, designing woman. And it has echoes—especially in the use of Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre as a leitmotif—of the haunting surreality and existentialism that infuses his strongest work.